Monday, 24 November 2014

The Age of Neoliberal Austerity: Part 4: Revolutionary Organisation

Picture from RT

Introduction

In three earlier articles in this series I discussed the
economic crisis, neoliberal society, and the new urban uprisings. From each
analysis I attempted to draw conclusions relevant to the task of rebuilding
revolutionary organisation in the early 21st century.

I decided not to
publish an early draft of a fourth article in this series – the one that
addressed directly the question, ‘What sort of revolutionary organisation
should we be attempting to build in the early 21st century?’

This was a wise
decision. My thinking has been radically altered by new experience. I wrote the
original articles a year ago, and since then, in company with a group of young
activists, I have left the small revolutionary organisation of which I was then
a member and become, for the first time in 40 years, a ‘non-aligned socialist’
(something I had always regarded as virtually a contradiction in terms).

We have now begun
to experiment with alternative ways of organising; something we could not have done
while remaining members of a small, top-down, overly prescriptive Old Left
organisation. This experience has not only confirmed, amplified, and clarified
earlier conclusions; it has also led to a paradigm shift in my thinking about
revolutionary organisation in the early 21st century.

It is time to share
these thoughts. They bear upon a vital historical task. We face the greatest
crisis in human history and a stark choice between barbarism (war, poverty, and
ecological catastrophe) and revolution (by which I mean the overthrow of the
rich, the banks, and the corporations, and the transfer of power to a
participatory democracy representing the 99%). To be able to exercise this
choice, we have to create mass revolutionary organisation; if we do not, the 1%
will continue to rule, and they will drive humanity and the planet into the
abyss.

This question is
too important for tip-toeing around sensitivities; it is necessary to speak
plainly. If we are serious about changing the world, we must stare reality in the
face.

For 35 years, I
have subscribed to something called ‘democratic-centralism’. I now consider
‘democratic-centralism’ (I will retain the inverted commas to indicate that I
consider this term/concept to be a shibboleth of the post-war Far Left) little
more than a justification for undemocratic, exclusionary, and sometimes abusive
top-down practice by largely self-perpetuating and self-selecting leaderships.
The effect has been to turn Far Left groups into revolving-doors, their
alienating internal regime repelling people as quickly as new ones are
recruited.

History repeats
itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. In the heyday of the
Far Left, from the late 60s to the mid 80s, no group ever grew beyond a few
thousand members; the air of democracy around the great struggles of the period
seems to have been too strong for such organisations to thrive. This was
tragedy: the possibility of building mass revolutionary organisation was lost.

Now, when many
groups are tiny splinters of 50 or 100, the ‘democratic-centralist’ model has
become farce. These splinters, which have virtually zero gravitational pull on
activists, no sooner form than they set up oppressive ‘democratic-centralist’
regimes that guarantee they will not grow.

Compounding the
farce is the fact that the multiplication of such splinters occurs at a time
when a) we face the greatest crisis of the capitalist system in its 250 years
of existence, b) record numbers of people appear to think that revolution is
needed, and c) there is a broader measure of agreement across the Left than at
any time in the last century. The definition of madness is to persist in doing
something that has already been shown not to work. By this definition, the Old
Left, organised in its multiplicity of tiny sects with their top-down model, is
mad.

Evidence of the
madness – small size and failure to grow – is rationalised in two ways. First,
members are told that ‘the period’ is unfavourable to the growth of
revolutionary organisation. Without mass struggle, it is unrealistic to expect
revolutionary organisations to grow, and one must patiently await ‘the upturn’
while dutifully recruiting ‘ones and twos’. Second, members are assured that
only their group, however small, has the correct ‘line’, and that therefore
they are the real revolutionaries; everyone else is some form of ‘sectarian’,
or ‘autonomist’, or ‘reformist’, or whatever.

Both of these
arguments are bogus. By one critical measure, there has in fact been a very
high level of struggle since 1999, when a new era of street protest began.
Demonstrations of a hundred thousand used to be once-in-a-decade events, but
they have been relatively frequent over the last 15 years. This, of course, is
related to the wider radical mood – the general alienation from the system, the
state, and the social elite, and the conviction among an exceptionally large
minority that revolutionary change is necessary.

In any case, history
suggests that revolutionary organisation can often grow very rapidly as an
expression of such a mood even in the absence of – perhaps, indeed, as a
substitute for – mass struggle.

Consider the
experience of the British Communist Party (CP) in the 1930s. Though no longer a
revolutionary party, the CP was widely seen as such at the time, and was the
natural home for working-class activists who considered themselves
revolutionaries. The British CP never achieved the mass membership of its
European counterparts; throughout its history it was (and remains) a ‘fringe’
party. Nonetheless, its achievement, in terms of membership, places it in a
different category from the whole of the post-war Far Left.

Membership had
peaked at 12,000 at the time of the General Strike in 1926. It thereafter
collapsed, mainly because of the downturn in struggle due to the defeat of the
strike and then the impact of mass unemployment after the 1929 financial crash,
hitting a low of fewer than 2,500 members.

But strong
united-front work through the dark years of the 1930s – mainly around
unemployment, high rents, fascism, and international solidarity – resulted in
substantial growth. Party membership was 6,500 in 1935, 11,000 in 1936, and
18,000 in 1939. In the middle of the Second World War, party membership peaked
at around 50,000. In other words, the CP became the primary expression of the
radicalisation of working-class activists, growing very substantially as a
result, even though the level of class struggle, certainly in the workplaces,
was relatively low.

As for the argument
that one should remain a member of a sect in order to preserve the purity of
one’s ‘line’, how ludicrous is that? A sectarian can be defined as someone who
places more importance on disagreement than agreement. A serious revolutionary,
on the other hand, seeks a political relationship with as many other people as
possible, and that means starting with what unites, not what divides. The
revolutionary organisation should contain all shades of opinion and provide the
main framework for debate about perspective and strategy. That way, we test our
ideas in debate, we win people to them if we are right, and we change our own
thinking if we are wrong. A revolutionary organisation of 10,000 is likely to
be a ferment of debate: this should be welcomed. It is politically pathological
to prefer an organisation of 100 characterised by dreary uniformity.

The Jacobins

Let us turn from the sorry state of the British Far Left to
some examples of healthy revolutionary organisation. When we review the
historical experience, we discover that there is no single all-purpose model.
Take the Jacobin Club of the French Revolution.

The Jacobin Club
was – as it said on the lid of the tin – a club. Initially, its members were well-heeled
revolutionaries who wanted to come together to discuss the great events in
which they were active participants. Later, as the more conservative
upper-bourgeois members peeled off, the Jacobin Club came to represent the more
radical lower-bourgeois revolutionaries, who were in alliance with the democratic
popular movement of the sansculottes
(essentially the urban petty-bourgeoisie).

The Jacobins became
a nationwide mass movement: the Paris
mother-club spawned numerous provincial offspring, and these formed a network,
linked together by regular correspondence and mutual visits.

As forging-houses
of revolutionary ideas, disseminators of revolutionary propaganda, and a
nationwide network of revolutionaries, the Jacobin Clubs evolved into a great
revolutionary party. To be a Jacobin meant to be a radical revolutionary.
Leading Jacobins formed the ruling Committee of Public Safety – the government
of France
– during the Revolution’s decisive year (1793-1794).

The Jacobin Club
was large, diverse, and often deeply divided within itself. Its history is a
history of rows and splits. But the arguments, note, took place inside the party.

The Bolsheviks

The modern Far Left shares a common model of the party based
on the experience of the Bolshevik Party of 1903-1917 – the only historical
example so far of a revolutionary party which has carried out a successful
working-class revolution.

The dominant scheme
of Bolshevik history goes something like this. Russian Marxism started as a
small propaganda group, the Emancipation of Labour Group. Lenin then developed
the model of the interventionist revolutionary party, combining theory and
practice, propaganda and agitation. On this basis, the membership of the
Russian Social-Democratic and Labour Party (as it became) grew first into
hundreds, then into a few thousands.

In 1903, however,
the Bolsheviks (‘the majority’) split from the Mensheviks (‘the minority’) to
form ‘a new type of party’. The Bolshevik Party then grew, mainly in the
context of two great upsurges of struggle, as a result of its mix of
propaganda, agitation, workplace activity, and the establishment of a socialist
paper. It then arrived on the eve of 1917 with the hardened cadre, the
organisational infrastructure, and the ideological clarity necessary to play a
decisive role in the events about to unfold.

The basic narrative
of the Bolshevik Party’s development was recast by the post-war Far Left in
conscious opposition to the dominant Social-Democratic and Stalinist traditions
of party organisation. This had the effect of fossilising an over-simplified
analysis of Bolshevik history in keeping with its polemical purpose. This
analysis needs to be radically revised.

Lenin’s party was
built in a vast, backward country with primitive communications, in the face of
severe police repression. Despite this, when, in the 1905 Revolution, the
struggle erupted and the autocracy was reeling, everything changed and Lenin
threw himself into an all-out internal struggle against ‘the committee-men’ of
the underground party he had created. They were now considered barriers to
recruitment, democracy, and spontaneity; barriers to the initiative and energy
of the newly radicalised masses. He wanted the doors of the party thrown wide
open and the highest levels of internal democracy and debate.

The difference
between the Leninist conception of the party in 1903 and that of 1905 could not
have been greater. Before the revolution, Lenin had insisted that ‘the leadership
of the movement should be entrusted to the smallest possible number of the most
homogeneous possible groups of professional revolutionaries with great
practical experience’. Two years later he was writing:

Really, I sometimes think that nine-tenths of the
Bolsheviks are actually formalists … We need young forces. I am for shooting on
the spot anyone who presumes to say that there are no people to be had. The
people in Russia
are legion; all we have to do is to recruit young people more widely and boldly
… without fearing them. This is a time of war. The youth – students, and still
more so the young workers – will decide the issue of the struggle. Get rid of
all the old habits of immobility, of respect for rank, and so on. Form hundreds
of [party] circles … from among the youth and encourage them to work
full-blast… Allow every sub-committee to write and publish leaflets without any
red tape (there is no harm if they do make a mistake) … Do not fear their lack
of training, do not tremble at their inexperience and lack of development …
Only you must be sure to organise, organise, and organise hundreds of circles,
completely pushing into the background the customary, well-meant committee
(hierarchic) stupidities.

A similar internal
struggle erupted at the beginning of the 1917 Revolution, again pitting Lenin
against most of the established cadre of the Bolshevik Party. What is
absolutely clear from the historical record is this: whenever it was possible
to engage in open political activity, Lenin favoured the highest possible level of inner party democracy. I challenge
any defender of ‘democratic-centralism’ to substantiate a contrary view.

But we must take this discussion a stage
further by posing two questions. First, why was Bolshevik practice relatively
‘undemocratic’ in other periods? And second, during these ‘undemocratic’
phases, what did ‘democratic-centralism’ actually mean?

The answers are surprising for anyone
brought up in the post-war Far Left tradition of party organisation. Why on
earth would a socialist revolutionary like Lenin want to restrict ‘the
leadership of the movement’ to ‘the smallest possible number of the most
homogeneous possible groups of professional revolutionaries’? After all, since
Marx, we have believed that ‘the emancipation of the working class will be the
act of the working class’, and that the socialist revolution – a revolution of
the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority – will necessarily
involve an explosion of collective action and participatory democracy.

There is no
evidence that Lenin ever thought differently. All the evidence is that he was
seeking to build a Russian equivalent of the German Social-Democratic Party
(SDP), which was the model for socialists across Europe
at the time. All the evidence is that his every instinct was profoundly
democratic.

The party of 1905
and 1917 was the ideal: an open, mass, democratic party. The problem was that Russia was a
police state. You cannot build an open, mass, democratic party in a police
state. If you allow amateurs (new members) to run an underground party, you will
expose it to crippling state repression. Democracy was the ideal, but the
exigencies of underground work precluded it. Most of the time, there could be no
party conferences or public meetings, no open debates or elections, inside Russia; had
there been, the participants would have been rounded up by the Tsarist police.

As for ‘democratic-centralism’,
it is not a Leninist term or concept. Had Lenin really created ‘a new type of
party’, we can assume, great polemicist that he was, that he would have spelt
this out clearly, presumably in the work usually cited as the manual of
‘democratic-centralism’, the pamphlet What
Is To Be Done. But in fact, neither the term nor the concept appears here.
Instead, a handful of passages, ripped from context and then, over the decades,
encrusted with layers of gloss, have been used to create the myth of
‘democratic-centralism’.

The reason What Is To Be Done makes no reference to
‘democratic-centralism’ is twofold. First, Lenin was not a
‘democratic-centralist’, but a democrat. He did not invent, propagate, or
practice any such concept as ‘democratic-centralism’. He merely proposed
sensible security measures to protect fragile socialist organisation from
police repression.

Second, even if
Lenin had been a ‘democratic-centralist’, he could not have practised it, since
there was no mechanism for imposing the rule of exiled party leaders on a
network of small, widely scattered, secretly organised socialist groups, with
whom communications were intermittent and highly tenuous. Indeed, any such
thing would have been madness, for the leadership was in no position to know how,
say, the Baku oil-workers, the Moscow
textile-workers, or the Petersburg
engineering-workers should best operate in the circumstances confronting them.
Any attempt to presume such knowledge from an exile enclave in distant Zurich would, given the
intensity of police repression, have been the height of irresponsibility, quite
possibly exposing activists to arrest and whole groups to liquidation.

Here is the
Bolshevik leader Piatnitsky making this explicit: ‘The initiative of the local
party organisations, of the cells, was encouraged. Were the Bolsheviks of
Odessa, or Moscow, or Baku,
or Tiflis, always to have waited for the
directives from the Central Committee, the provincial committees, etc, which
during the years of the reaction and of the war frequently did not exist at all
owing to arrests, what would have been the result? The Bolsheviks would not
have captured the working masses and exercised any influence over them.’

And, of course,
when it did become possible to impose
a ‘democratic-centralist’ model, Lenin advocated the opposite: as the quote
above demonstrates, when the party came into the open, he favoured maximum
democracy and declared war on the Bolshevik Old Guard!

The key argument in
What Is To Be Done concerns the party
paper. Lenin’s argument was that a single organ and an efficient distribution
mechanism would have the effect of binding the different branches of the RSDLP
into a more coherent, united, and therefore effective organisation. (Note: the
RSDLP as a whole, not the Bolshevik faction alone. For, in formal terms, the
Bolsheviks remained a faction of the RSDLP, albeit an increasingly dominant
one, in conformity with Lenin’s conception of a mass socialist party on the
model of the German SDP.)

The whole theory of
‘democratic-centralism’ as expounded and practised by the post-war Far Left –
operating legally and openly in the conditions of a liberal parliamentary
democracy – appears to have nothing to do with Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

The International Socialists

The results of the ‘democratic-centralist’ model – in terms
of membership and party building – have always been poor. The classic pattern
for post-war Far Left groups has been as follows.

A small propaganda
group would start with less than a hundred people, usually having split from a
larger group on the basis of some sort of ‘deviation’, ‘degeneration’, or
‘betrayal’. The main British Trotskyist groups, for example, can all trace
their roots back to the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) of the 1940s.

The more successful
groups would then grow slowly through abstract propaganda (the winning of small
numbers of people on the basis of large numbers of general ideas). This
‘primitive accumulation of cadre’ might be assisted by spurts of growth
associated with large mass movements or particular campaigns and struggles
involving the group’s members. In Britain, the Socialist Labour League (later
the Workers Revolutionary Party), the International Marxist Group, the
International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers Party), and the Militant
(later the Socialist Party) all seem to have reached this stage by the late
1960s, in each case having a membership in the low hundreds. Numerous groups in
the rest of Europe also reached this stage at
about the same time.

Some groups then
made the next leap, becoming what might be described as ‘small mass parties’,
with membership in the low thousands and branches in most sizeable towns,
having grown mainly through intervention in the mass struggles of 1968-1975 and
after. Let us take the experience of the International Socialists (IS) as an example.

During the 1950s, a
period shaped by the Second Great Boom and the Cold War, IS was a small
propaganda group of less than 100. Between 1960 and 1964, the emergence of CND,
the first mass movement in post-war Britain, provided an opportunity
for agitation and intervention among a new generation of young activists.
Because the Labour Party Young Socialists was a natural home for such activists,
IS members were active within it, and IS membership topped 200 for the first
time. Agitation and intervention, including some industrial work, allowed IS to
double in size again during the first three years of the new Labour Government
(1964-1967).

With about 450
members at the beginning of 1968, IS was able to grow dramatically during the
Left’s annus mirabilis, ending the
year with a thousand members. Between 1968 and 1975, IS ‘turned’ its mainly
student and white-collar members towards the organised working class, just as
the post-war industrial struggle reached its peak. The membership gains, both
quantitative and qualitative, were impressive: from about 900 members in 1970
to 2,350 in 1972, of whom 26% were manual workers and 31% white-collar workers.

Further gains
followed, membership apparently hitting 3,900 in 1974 (though Far Left
organisations are notorious for exaggerating, often grossly, their own
membership figures). This was the year in which a miners’ strike brought down a
Tory government. The rest of the decade was one of protracted and convoluted
crisis, characterised by mass unemployment, high inflation, attacks on living
standards, a Labour government imposing cuts, an employers’ offensive against
workplace union organisation, and an upsurge of racism and fascist violence. IS
(which became the SWP in 1977) was at the heart of the resistance.

It remained so
under the Thatcher government in the 1980s. Though the working class was now
very much on the defensive, the space for revolutionary politics was wide. The
Bolsheviks had continued to grow during the revolutionary downturn from late 1905
to the end of 1907 (reaching a peak of 45,000 members only at the end of this
period). The British Communist Party grew dramatically during the Great
Depression (see above). There is good reason for seeing the period from the mid
1970s to the late 1980s as potentially propitious for the growth of
revolutionary organisation. Labour was discredited by its record in government,
and the new Thatcher government’s determination to smash the unions and the
post-war ‘welfare consensus’ triggered a succession of massive class battles,
of which the 1984-1985 Miners’ Strike and the 1989-1990 Poll Tax Revolt were
the most significant. The polarised class politics of the 1980s, with a
militant working class bitterly defending its post-war gains, might have
produced a stronger revolutionary Left. It did not.

Militant, ensconced
inside the Labour Party and dominating some Labour councils, notably Liverpool,
gained members, but never enough to break out of the ‘small mass party’ league.
The SWP membership figures seem to be disputed. The party may have sustained
membership at around 4,000 throughout this period, or it may have dipped in the
late 1970s and the early to mid 1980s, only to return to peak level towards the
end of the decade. Either way, there was no real breakthrough.

The British pattern
was replicated elsewhere. No Trotskyist party has ever become a mass party.
None has ever been able to play a role comparable with that of the mass
Communist parties in the interwar period. The crisis of the 1970s and the great
class battles of the 1980s might have been expected to produce a growth in
revolutionary organisation comparable with that of the (by then
less-than-revolutionary) CP in the 1930s. It did not.

Equally, the crisis
that broke in 2008 – unquestionably comparable with that of the 1930s – might
also have been expected to produce such growth. It has not – despite the strong
tradition of mass street protest since 1999. These hard realities must be
faced.

What is to be done?

I have presented a number of arguments – in this and the
previous three articles – which I feel should frame any discussion of
revolutionary organisation in the early 21st century. They can be
summarised as follows:

1. The contradiction between the scale of the capitalist
crisis and the political weakness of the working class is probably greater than
at any time in history.

2. The ongoing centralisation and concentration of capital
has weakened the state as an independent economic actor, reducing opportunities
for social reform, and eroding the effectiveness of parliamentary democracy.

3. While fostering globalisation, financialisation, and
growing corporate power, neoliberalism has weakened civil-society institutions,
most importantly the trade unions, undermined the tradition of collective
provision and social welfare, and engineered a more atomised and privatised
social order.

4. The result has been, on the one hand, high levels of
alienation, disaffection, and resistance, but, on the other, an erosion of the
political and industrial organisation necessary to structure and sustain
resistance. One consequence of this is that street protest predominates over
industrial action. Another is that protest tends to be spontaneous, explosive,
and short-lived.

5. The revolutionary vanguard has been reconfigured by these
economic, social, political, and cultural changes. It still includes (in Britain)
some tens of thousands of ‘traditional’ left activists rooted in unions,
parties, and campaigns. But it also includes a more amorphous, shifting group
of ‘new’ activists, mainly young, typically students and/or precarious workers,
usually ‘non-aligned’, often suspicious of formal organisation. Indeed, in
terms of numbers, this group is potentially much larger than the first. The
revolutionary vanguard today is largely formed of radicalised urban youth
prepared to come onto the streets.

6. All post-war attempts to build mass revolutionary parties
on a ‘democratic-centralist’ model have to be regarded as failures, especially
when set against the opportunities for growth represented by the period from
1968 to the late 1980s, and again in the period since 1999, and especially
since 2008. This model, in any case, turns out to be a modern myth – not so
much a caricature of the theory and practice of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party as a
wholesale inversion of its deeply democratic and dynamic character.

We have to return
to an earlier, more successful model. The ‘democratic-centralist’ model of
revolutionary organisation was developed during the Great Boom (1948-1973) –
not, in fact, as the myth has it, during the building of the Bolshevik Party
(1903-1917). It seemed to fit a period when revolutionary ideas were
marginalised by full employment, rising living-standards, and the expansion of
the welfare state; reformism seemed to be working, and relatively few
working-class activists could be won to revolutionary politics, at least before
1968.

We live in a very
different world. Capitalism is in deep, long-term, intractable crisis. The
system is propelling humanity and the planet towards cataclysm. Social
Democracy is effectively dead: the Labour Party has been transformed into an
alternative party of the corporations and the rich. Millions are alienated from
the political and business elite, and hundreds of thousands think revolution
necessary.

There is, moreover,
a new mood among young activists. After 15 years of mass protest, the state of
the world today is worse than ever. Six years into the economic crisis, the
gulf between rich and poor continues to widen, and the mass of ordinary people
face an ever-mounting burden of low pay, rising prices, and welfare cuts.
Things are getting worse, and more quickly.

One-off
demonstrations, single-issue campaigns, protest movements that go up like a
rocket and down like a stick are no longer enough. The question of organisation
has moved to centre-stage. But this does not mean deciding which ‘democratic-centralist’
sect to join; a choice which the great majority of young activists will not
take. It means building a mass revolutionary organisation on a broad democratic
basis.

The criteria for
creating such an organisation are, I would suggest, very simple:

1. An understanding that we confront a single system and a
compound crisis of that system, and that to end war, poverty, and climate
change, and to create a world of peace, equality, democracy, and
sustainability, we need a red-green revolution to overthrow that system.

2. A commitment to creating a broad, inclusive, bottom-up
activist organisation, in which alternative perspectives and strategies are
argued out and decided democratically, and in which the initiative, creativity,
and independence of all members and groups of members are actively fostered.

We need spontaneity
and democracy, but we also need organisation. We need the spirit of Occupy, but
we also need a network of red-green revolutionary groups that can maintain the
momentum and sustain a rising tide of mass protest and mass resistance.

I am a Marxist, a
Leninist, and a Trotskyist. It is precisely because of this that I reject the
conservatism and pessimism of the Old Left – conservative in upholding a
‘democratic-centralist’ model that has obviously failed, and pessimistic in
attributing this failure to society’s lack of revolutionary potential. The Old
Left seems no longer to believe, as Lenin did, in ‘the actuality of the
revolution’; rather, despite the global crisis and the mass radicalisation, it
sees it as something so distant as to be almost unattainable.

We have to break with
such conservatism and pessimism, and the false model in which it is rooted, and
rediscover an authentic mass revolutionary tradition. We should deliberately
set out to build a mass revolutionary organisation, not a sect, and we should
understand this to mean the most democratic political organisation imaginable.

A revolutionary
organisation is, above all, an amalgam of the most idealistic, the most
confident, and the most dynamic of society’s young people. Its primary function
is to unleash the transformative political energy they represent. Its end goal
is to accumulate the mass forces required to make the red-green revolution we
need to save humanity and our planet.

Acknowledgements and
Sources

First is the deed. My
thinking has been shaped by 30 years in membership of a (relatively) large Far
Left organisation and then four years in the leadership of a very small one. I
have since broken with that organisation and have been working with others to
test alternatives to the failed ‘democratic-centralist’ model.

But while theory without practice is futile,
equally, practice without theory is blind. And I must acknowledge one enormous
theoretical debt. This is to Lars Lih’s monumental study Lenin
Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done in Context (2008).
I consider his argument to be unanswerable. I have yet to read any
counter-thrust – and there are predictably many – that has succeeded in denting
the main argument, let alone demolishing it.

Lars Lih has, in my view, performed a
service of immense value to the international Left. He has shown us that the
greatest socialist revolutionary in history – the only one to lead a successful
working-class revolution – was a democrat, not a ‘democratic-centralist’, and
an advocate of mass revolutionary organisation, not of sects led by
‘professional revolutionaries’ who lay down ‘the line’.

2 comments:

I'm struck by a lot of sense about the problems of the more sectarian forms of Leninism but a continuation of the one big push perspective that formed not just the perspective but the justification for such a thing (ie a revolutionary leadership in waiting). There is perhaps a parallel with the early Socialism ou Barbari who before they dropped the catastrophist perspective (in those days not of economic crisis but of imminent nuclear catastrophe) cleaved close to CLR James and Duneskaya. It was when they moved away from this perspective that they began to say more interesting things and began to have a larger cultural impact. Of course they never had the impact that 'Leninists' of a particular kind would have wished but if one takes away that yardstick they didn't do too badly. But the difficulties of forming an actual organisation which really was actively concerned with democratic participation sadly proved a bit too much for them. It ain't easy.

I agree with much of what you say Neil but this bit stood out: “5. The revolutionary vanguard has been reconfigured by these economic, social, political, and cultural changes. It still includes (in Britain) some tens of thousands of ‘traditional’ left activists rooted in unions, parties, and campaigns. But it also includes a more amorphous, shifting group of ‘new’ activists, mainly young, typically students and/or precarious workers, usually ‘non-aligned’, often suspicious of formal organisation. Indeed, in terms of numbers, this group is potentially much larger than the first. The revolutionary vanguard today is largely formed of radicalised urban youth prepared to come onto the streets.”I don’t know if it’s correct at this point in time to talk of a “revolutionary vanguard”, and I certainly don’t think the people who make up either the activist left, or young people involved in the protest movement can be considered to make it up.Traditionally, when Marxists have talked about a “vanguard” they meant the leading, most advanced elements of a much larger, mass working class movement. Even in the 1970s, when the working class movement was much stronger, and socialist ideas were much more widespread, Duncan Hallas argued it was wrong to be talking about a “vanguard” in this sense. The danger for me is that revolutionaries like ourselves start looking around for a vanguard when none exists, and we end up projecting those qualities onto parts of the movement. This was the mistake of various Maoist and Trotskyist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, who projected vanguard status onto students and unorganised workers. We should be careful not to do the same with the student and protest movements today.

Neil Faulkner

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I am an archaeologist, historian, writer, revolutionary socialist, and author of A Marxist History of the World: from neanderthals to neoliberals. This blog is intended as a modest contribution to discussion on the Left about the nature of the system and the global crisis, the condition of the working class, and how, in the early 21st century, we should answer the old question ‘What is to be done?’